Chapter Text
A light overnight rain wet the limestone edifice, and in the morning, a girl takes a boar's-bristle brush and goes outside to scrub the stairs. It is a task both unsolicited and thankless, but it's good have the sensory cleanse of open air when so many recent breaths have been cloyed by incense or decay.
She's also acquired a quiet problem. It all began with dreams that make her want to be near Jaqen all the time, and yet not at all lest he sense it and drill her on how a girl who would dissolve into no one could feel any tug of affection for a man who was already there. It is an unpleasant threshold for a heart to cross, and it can't help that she's also synched with the moon and every problem seems far bigger than it is.
How she loathes being tethered to the moon...all month long she's nearly no one, and then this unseen piece of her kicks to life to remind her who she is. Was. She never quite forgets, and how could she? One day she'll don nothing but men's faces to test if this pinching hell in her middle will go away.
She ignores the discomfort and scrubs out a song for her family: a stroke for every syllable of every name, then a chorus of those she will kill. When the bristles begin to asymmetrize, she rotates the brush and digs in again until the gentle nudge of Jaqen's sandal pulls her out of her trance. "A girl was not asked to do this." He takes a moment to survey her work. "She serves the Many-Faced God well."
Arya sits back on her heels and shrugs. "Stairs are as important as the house."
"A girl won't get much further with a brush that's worn down to wood. And there's work inside if she will come in."
She shrugs again and allows him to help her up to her feet. As she walks beside him, a man senses a difference in her today. A brightness is missing and her carriage is different, but a man will not voice this because her secrets are not his to know.
He brings her inside to where three are waiting, two laid out and one yet alive. The one yet alive is scheming to fight and a man quietly leaves them to their work, knowing that they are another step closer to the day when only one remains.
"Where have you been all morning?" the Waif asks, haughty as a hated queen and the day's only just begun. "These two died and you were nowhere to be found."
"They'd been kneeling for days. No one knew when they'd decide it was time." Arya frowns. Usually she'd hold onto Jaqen's praise like a jewel, but she blocks it out because she needs all wits about her now. There's something wrong with this one, who isn't nearly as suited to service as she likes to believe. She's a far cry from no one. She's awful.
She also seems to know Arya's affliction and exploits it. The velvet oval buckles and twists in her center and she needs nothing more than to break away and deal with the blood, but more and more work is heaped upon her. "You will clean their fingernails and I will check that you've done it well."
After that, there are their feet. When the bodies are taken away, she tyrannically announces tasks they've never done before: the tables need washing with mineral spirits and the bottles and jugs should be emptied into bowls, cleaned, and refilled; with that, a girl walks away. The wretch can follow, if she likes, and might get hit with a sopping red rag if she does.
Arya wends to the room where the clothes of the dead are heaped until high enough to bale for the paper mill, and gets down on her knees and tears a strip of linen along the grain and fashions it into a little folded roll. She makes several others to tuck away for later, unaware that Jaqen walks past and sees. Not only does he see, he knows.
He turns away; this is for the thing that most men fear, or at the very least avoid...it's far too intimate for a man to know and yet a man does.
Two rooms away from the girls' work he cures the inside of the freshest face and overhears the snippy talk and slaps continue into the afternoon. The first girl's cruelty starts to rage and her voice raises to unnecessary heights...jealousy is souring her blood. It will be her undoing, this.
"You'll never be ready. Join your family and stop wasting the time of those who are."
"A girl has no family."
"Yes she does. Arya Stark should go outside and jump in the water with weighted ankles. You miss them, don't you? Join them. You're not wanted or useful here." She enjoys the reaction and continues. "And I'm not the only one who thinks it."
This is too much, and Jaqen places himself in the doorway, still as stone until he is seen. The first girl recoils while the darker eyes welcome him.
"A girl asks to be excused. Please."
He nods, fielding the scowl from the other, then mirrors it. "It is not wise to speak for others," he says sternly, surveying the mess of bottles. The uncomfortable will usually fill silence, but this one does not so he fills it himself. "It would seem that this girl now has twice the work."
He catches up with Arya on the way to her alcove and her mind races as his fingers wrap tight around her bicep.
Am I in trouble? He can't punish me, I haven't done anything wrong, and why can't it just be us? I probably don't really have all those stupid feelings anyway. I probably just want to learn in peace.
When they're a few steps away, her heart starts to pound.
If he so much as grazes me with that stupid stick I'll probably cry and I can't have him see that.
A quick excuse is made so maybe he won't. "A girl doesn't feel well and wants to lie down."
"Then a girl should." She curls submissively with her back to him and the vulnerability pains him, a bit. Such burdens for this girl...
"A girl should know that she is useful. And wanted."
"She's also selfish and hates another with the fire of every hell."
"Then her talents are wasted. She serves her God well and all else is nothing."
She sighs tiredly. "A girl will feel better in a few days."
Again, a man can hardly believe he knows this about her. Facing the wall, it seems that she is trying to make herself smaller.
A man sometimes remembers things from another life. He once knew a woman who explained the mechanics and periodic misery of her kind. This woman taught him the paradox of how a careful press on the distal outside brought relief to a hollow both frontal and inside, which made no sense but then many things that are true do not.
"If she trusts a man, a girl might feel better now."
"She trusts him."
He sinks to sit beside her, ducking to not crack his head, and a slow hand roams over the back of her tunic in search of a tender spot at the base of her spine. She stiffens at the unexpected touch but then slacks into the stone as he finds the spot just above where the butterfly halves join the ribbed arrowhead and presses with a thumb.
"Oh."
A man has long wondered how they keep it so hidden, the coppery scent halfway between life & death.
A girl bites back a sound, embarrassed to have made it, but then melts into a sigh as the pressure remains. After a time he gently rolls her onto her front so that he might lean into her with an elbow, not too hard and not too soft.
A man could speak of the time he caught a woman lying on a potato to simulate this, but does not.
"A girl wishes to repay this kindness with stacks of gold as high as this house."
"But she has none, just as a man has no use for it."
"All the same."
He works so deep it elicits a moan that awakens a thing in him that he thought was mostly gone.
"Gods, that's good."
He can't help getting carried away and presses so hard she gasps.
"Too much, too much. Yes. Yes, like that."
"Does it help?'
"Mmm. It does."
She shifts and turns to gaze up at him with one eye. "When a girl had a name and a family, her sister had a cedar chest for woolens," she says. "A girl would scratch the inside of the lid with an awl to awaken the scent, and the sister would scream and pinch her for ruining it, even thought it was in a place where no one would see." Her voice gets smaller. "A man this close smells like cedar."
It's as if his throat holds a stone. All the years of being a nameless shadow or the last thing some men see, and yet a girl is winding her way into his details and anchoring him to this self he isn't. Or is. Was? Is. No. Now...a man does not even know.
He leans back in to fit his elbow into her spot again; her eye closes and a current flows between their two layers of cloth, and it swells and ebbs to smaller than it is...perhaps this is not strange. Two can touch this way without a greater meaning; their accord does not require a new name. She stirs. "That's enough. A girl is grateful and well enough to scrub stairs or whatever a man asks. Anything for the Many-Faced God."
He takes back pressure ounce by ounce until it's gone. It's a sudden loss not to touch so a hand returns to the small of her back. It is avuncular only, this, but then...how has she pulled him back to lessening the suffering of one who once held his heart in both hands?
"A girl has served enough for today, and the body may rest so long as the mind remains devoted to her God."
Her eyes are wide and clear as she rolls onto her back. "A girl is devoted." She squeezes his hand in brief thanks, then her nails lightly scratch his inner wrist and she touches it to her nose.
A soft joy ripples through him as he leaves her, followed closely by fear.
A man knows to whom she is devoted.